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Hasil Adkins, Wild Man of Rockabilly, Dies at 68

Hasil Adkins, a rockabilly singer who became a cult figure among record collectors and musicians for his raw, idiosyncratic music and outsize personality, was found dead on Tuesday at his home near Madison, W.Va. He was 68.

The cause was unknown, said Sheriff Rodney Miller of Boone County. The police were still investigating the case yesterday and were awaiting a report from the state's medical examiner, Sheriff Miller said.

Mr. Adkins made a handful of scrappy rockabilly records in the 1960's, all released in very small quantities. At the time he was barely known outside his hometown. But for a generation of collectors and fans who discovered his music in later decades, he became a symbol of American musical primitivism.

Wailing in a scratchy Appalachian tenor and bashing with abandon on his one-man-band setup of guitar and drums, Mr. Adkins was proudly unpolished as a musician, and his fans celebrated his music as an extreme yet homespun version of the classic early rock 'n' roll sound of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Starting in the mid-50's, Mr. Adkins recorded hundreds of songs at home in rural West Virginia, accompanying himself on all the instruments. He played as a one-man band because, he later said, as a child he had heard Hank Williams and others on the radio and had assumed that the one named musician in the band played all the instruments himself.

His songs often straddled a line between the raucously funny and the disturbingly horrific. "She Said," his most famous tune, is a tall tale about the morning after a particularly regrettable one-night stand. "We Got a Date," sung in a gravelly sneer, tells a macabre story that features one of Mr. Adkins's favorite themes: beheading.

Mr. Adkins's few records began to circulate among collectors in the 70's, and his legend grew when the Cramps recorded a version of "She Said."

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By the early 80's Mr. Adkins had been contacted by a few admirers and fanzine writers, and Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, two enthusiastic fans who run Norton Records in New York, collected some of his early recordings on an album, "Out to Hunch," in 1986.

That recording and several others released by Norton in the next few years, including "The Wild Man" and "Peanut Butter Rock and Roll," were greeted with amazement by critics and musicians. Robert Palmer of The New York Times called Mr. Adkins's songs "some of the most enthusiastically demented records in the annals of rock 'n' roll."

After the release of "Out to Hunch," Mr. Adkins toured widely, often playing in clubs filled with fans who knew all the words to his songs. He was known to shock even his longtime fans and associates with his decidedly unbourgeois behavior.

"He was playing in a club one night," Mr. Miller said in an interview contained in the book "Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. 1." "The ceiling fan was whirling around, making a creaky sound, and without missing a lick he reached down, pulled out a gun and shot it down -- it was interfering with the song."

His survivors include a sister, Irene Dolin, of Madison, and a brother, Donald.

As feral as Mr. Adkins's music sounded to many listeners, he himself believed that it was nothing other than simple rock 'n' roll.

"I didn't try to be primitive," he once said. "I just had bad microphones."